Pages

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

John Mauk's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.

Today, John Mauk, author of Field Notes for the Earthbound, contemplates what it'd be like to serve up his characters a couple glasses of coca wine, just for the hell of it:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve tried a
Jägerbomb, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, I’d like to buy the world a
coca wine. Back in the nineteenth century, people drank it as a matter of
course. They could walk down to the local apothecary, grab a bottle, and sail
back home—yahooing into the sky or just humming quietly with a mix of
pick-me-up and slow-me-down. Plenty of sources document coca wine’s popularity
among those with means. Clergy, lawyers, teachers, and various writerly types consumed
it openly and often. They celebrated its curative oomph—its power to eradicate
headaches, calm nervous stomachs, or jolt groggy genitalia.

Coca wine
offered a unique glow, something more than a belly full of bourbon or a
straight shot of stimulant. Apparently, the alcohol and coca bean joined
molecular arms in the blood stream and spawned a euphorigenic creature known,
in chemical terms, as cocaethylene. And
I suspect that coca wine tasted better than any of our current liqueur-based beverages.
I imagine it running over the taste buds with the same oozy refinement as tawny
port—and I imagine that it induced a calm wakefulness, like zooming over a cartoon
hillside on a wind-powered skateboard. No internal combustion, no high fructose
aftertaste. Unfortunately, some good ol’ fashioned racism converged with the
forces of temperance and made a bogeyman of coca wine. By the twentieth
century, it was mostly gone. Racism was not.

The characters
in Field Notes for the Earthbound
come along in the mid-twentieth century. Their stories are set on the Ohio
flatland just as alcohol starts showing up in small town grocery stores—a sign,
for some, of the end times. They don’t have coca wine or anything close. In
fact, I’d say they live in a culinary wasteland, an era fueled by potted meats,
canned vegetables, and watery bottled beer. So if I could, I’d serve my
surviving characters, especially the cranky ones, a coca wine. Now that they’ve
finished their narrative chores, they deserve something other than tight-lipped
temperance or Old Crown.

After a
second pour, a third for the cranky ones, my characters and I’d get all metaphorical.
We’d talk hard about their stories. I’d claim that they dramatize the battle
between euphoria and temperance, magic and reality. I’d say it just like that. Marigold
Holloway would reluctantly agree and then sob, finally, for her dead husband. Jacob
Ferrick, whose mother was a witch (a real witch), would argue that it’s no
battle at all, that reality is always under the yoke of invisible forces most
people cannot imagine. Peckerhead Phil, of course, would take the opposite
stance and insist that stories are one thing, reality another. In the space
between assertions, Walter Laney, the retired priest turned insult comic, would
call everyone names and laugh himself stupid. Gene Whitman, the old Nazarene
healer, would stay silent. He’d drink his drinks and smile from the corner of
the room.

Tweaked up
and dreamy on cocaethylene, we’d carouse through the night. We’d invent
theories about Kathryn Mueller’s famous final flight, how she went from night bird
to dead girl facedown in a field. We’d raise glasses and toast her lucidity,
her absolute certainty about what people are and how they work. And then we’d
roll along until sunrise listening to everything Jeremy could not divulge in
“The Electric Nowhere,” all the things he omitted about his uncle, his yearning
for Helen, and his final violent act on the flatland. He’d say terrible things
about Len Polk’s last seconds on the planet, and maybe we wouldn’t care so much
because, damn it, Len Polk was a lowdown scoundrel.

And maybe at
the end, we’d hear from Helen and Joel’s child—a woman now, someone most of us
never got to meet. She was just a slight bulge when she was carried off. I
would recognize her, of course, because she’d have Joel’s and Helen’s
features—his fierce jaw, her crystalline eyes. I would say that I’ve wanted to
hear her voice for years, that I’ve wondered what tales she’d heard about all of
these crazed flatlanders. And with all of us leaning in close, she would describe
her life in California—after all these stories and far away from her own
beginning. She would tell us—I’m certain of it—how she sometimes, on calm
nights and for no apparent reason, lifts her window and howls into the air, back
to the east and through the decades.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

John Mauk has a
Masters degree in literature from the University of Toledo and a PhD in
rhetoric from Bowling Green State University. He writes and works at the
intersection of rhetoric and fiction. He has three college writing textbooks,
published by Wadsworth/Cengage. In 2010, his short collection "The Rest of
Us" won Michigan Writer’s Cooperative Press chapbook contest, and its
first story, “The Earthbound,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His debut
novel, Field Notes for the Earthbound, was a finalist in the Hudson Prize
contest. For more info, visit www.johnmauk.com.

1 comment:

Field Notes for the Earthbound is one of those books you read sober and then wonder if you'd been drinking all along. It's a good drunk, one where you smile at jokes not meant for you to hear and get uncomfortable when you remember all its characters are human, even the witch. Cocawine or not, this is a book to raise a glass to. Bravo. To your health!

Currently Reading

Currently Listening To

TNBBC Merchandise

Who's That Girl?

I have been buried beneath small press and self-published review copies since 2009. My passion for supporting the small press and self publishing communities has driven me out into the world wide web to demonstrate alternative ways to spread the word about amazing publishers, authors, and novels you might never had heard of. Feeding your reading addiction, one book at a time.